Showing posts with label star wars. Show all posts
Showing posts with label star wars. Show all posts

Friday, July 24, 2009

Coal to Diamond, Marvel does good, Jake Lloyd, Facebook

Can Superman Make Diamonds from Coal?

Thanks to JimD who sent this along:

Legendary question-answer man, Cecil, takes on the old Superman trick of using Super-strength to squeeze coal with so much pressure, it becomes a diamond.

The Straight Dope

While its understandable why one would want to find ways to make diamonds to impress Annette O'Toole (the trick was employed in the Pryor-rich Superman III), this was also done in the comics in the Silver Age. But Superman also used to fly so fast he would travel through time, and regularly destroy landmarks (and super-rebuild them) just to mess with Lois's head. So, you know...


Marvel Does Some Geek Good

Well, this is blowing my mind. In the 1980's, there was a comic on the stands called, alternately, "Marvelman" and "Miracle Man". The character may have the most complicated publishing history in comics, and I highly recommend you read the Wikipedia entry, as its quite fascinating. A knock-off of Captain Marvel for England (as Captain marvel had been a knock-off of Superman from a Mid-Western publisher), the character became caught up in some pretty serious legal disputes in the late 1990's or so, and has been in limbo ever since. This has meant no reprints, and odd stabs from different creators who've claimed they owned bits and pieces of Marvelman to put out product.

Creators with names like Neil Gaiman and Alan Moore have not just made their mark, but had ownership privileges, and its all led to Marvelman gaining a reputation as the best comic many comic readers haven't just never read, but which was impossible to obtain. To actually buy the back issues to read the series is prohibitively expensive.

Or was.

Apparently, Marvel just decided to cut checks to all involved and has purchased the rights to Marvelman.

Here.

This most likely means reprints and new material and a bunch of comic nerds in their early 30's and 20's who are now waiting for announcements about the reprints.

Well done, Marvel! I've only been waiting since about 1995 to read these stories.


Here's Jake Lloyd, the guy who played Anakin Skywalker in "The Phantom Menace"




He turned into a bitter nerd kid. Awesome.

Facebook

By the way, if you aren't a fan yet on Facebook, I'm actually using the thing. There's a bit of what I'd call Bonus Content. Plus, you get comments, etc... from folks who are coming in by way of Facebook.

Anyhow, use that box over there on the left and join up! Facebook is free and mostly not-scary.

Sunday, January 18, 2009

Star Wars - by someone who has never seen Star Wars


Star Wars: Retold (by someone who hasn't seen it) from Joe Nicolosi on Vimeo.

For some reason this made me think of Marshall. I have no idea why.

I think because in the Summer of 1993 I told Jill the entire story of Return of the Jedi while Marshall helped me fill the details.

Tuesday, December 02, 2008

and you accused Jake Lloyd of making Star Wars cheesy...

Donnie + Marie + Dilution of Brand = Awesome

Just FYI: The first video's audio track is really, really far off from the picture. I don't even know what would cause this and I used to work with video equipment for years.





I also want to say: Redd Foxx on Donnie & Marie as Obi Wan has filled a special place in my heart I didn't even know was empty. Thanks, internet!

really, the thought of Redd Foxx as any kind of mentor to Donnie Osmond sort of blows the mind...

Tip o' the hat to Journalista

Monday, June 23, 2008

For JimD

This is exactly the sort of thing that make JimD embrace George Lucas and the Star Wars universe with both arms and give them a big hug and a sloppy kiss.

Thursday, May 15, 2008

Stray Thought of the Day: Ewoks are Evil

Hey...

In "Return of the Jedi", remember how the Ewoks had captured our band of adventurers and were taking them back to their village? If it were not for Luke's quick use of the force and C3PO's improvisation as a minor diety, weren't the Ewoks going to cook and EAT Luke, Han, Chewie and the others?

Logically, can we assume then that the Ewoks may have had some success eating previous interlopers to the forest? Such as the contract crew which would have had to come to Endor to build the shield generator? And, possibly, the Storm Troopers themselves?

One has to wonder, then, if when the Rebels and Ewoks allied in the 3rd reel if the Ewoks weren't just thinking "it sure is neat how this meal is helping us catch a whole bunch of other meals! Why, when we're done consuming the white-shelled ones, we can use their head-shells as bowls or drums!" And, also, were Han and Co. not foolish for so easily trusting the little monsters once C3PO had won their freedom? After all, they had to still look quite succulent to the beady little eyes of the Ewok village.


Chief Chirpa points to the proper location for the chips, veggie tray and Rack of Solo.

Perhaps it is only our genetic predisposition to see small, cute things with big eyes as innocent that keeps us blind to the menace beneath the leather hood (what kind of leather? Dried and tanned Storm Trooper flesh?).

Perhaps the Storm Troopers were in the right to want to kill themselves an Ewok, so as not to wind up as a main dish at some feast (surely blasting with the tunes of Meco).

You also kind of have to wonder how awful the 6 movie series would have wrapped up if Luke had met his fate as a casserole.


Wicket found most of the meal delectable, but the large, furry one was a bit chewie.

Friday, March 21, 2008



thanks to Nicole, who has grown to know me well

Tuesday, May 29, 2007

The Lameness Continues...

Hey, all. Welcome back to the lamest blog, ever.

Last night was surprisingly quiet. I caught up on some much needed Comic Fodder work (I mean, needed for me... not the general populace). With no Matt nor Doug and Kristen, the house was stunningly quiet. I think the dogs were just flat-out tired as they just weren't interested in harassing me at any point during the evening.

Really, not much to mention, which is why this is the lamest blog ever.

DC Rehabilitates the Supergirl Re-launch


The 2004 re-appearance of Supergirl wound up looking like this.

She will now look like:



here's the article.

In other words, Supergirl's flailing re-launch is going to make Supergirl into a girl once again and not a bratty LA party rat. Writer Tony Bedard is also a name writer with some good stuff behind him, so I'm looking forward to the new artistic and story direction. Not enough of a change to have to write a whole story around it, but also DC isn't insisting that they're giving the readers a version of the character we want, when, clearly it is NOT the Supergirl readers want. More than anything, it's a Supergirl that fits into 70 years of Superman comics and more than fifty years of Supergirl without seeming to alter the character so radically that it's no longer recognizably Supergirl.



the Astros' slide continues...



Blogging Countdown.

In addition to my usual Comic Fodder duties, I'm partnering with a gentleman from my office named Jason (no relation to my brother of the same name) to write a series of columns discussing DC's new weekly comic, "Countdown" and how it relates to DC, Comics in general, etc...

Check it out if you have the time. Hopefully the discussion will be entertaining.



I think I'm supposed to blog on some Jack in the Box commercials, but since I never saw them except on You Tube, I've not really developed an opinion of them. Sorry, team.



Lauren posted this, but it's so good, I must repost. Rejected Wii games.



Whenever I feel like comic geeks are weird, there's always Star Wars fans.



This weekend was the 30th Anniversary of Star Wars, which meant a massive Star Wars Celebration in San Diego, where they finally answered the question: No, you cannot have too many Princess Leia's.

More pics here.

Thursday, May 24, 2007

STAR WARS ANNIVERSARY

There's been some buzz about Star Wars' 30th anniversary lately. So now's as good a time to talk about it as any.

Like probably millions of other American kids, my childhood is intrinsically mixed up with the Star Wars franchise. There's no beginning of my memory of childhood that is really separated from my first memories of Star Wars. My earliest memories include falling down some carpeted stairs at an apartment complex where we briefly lived and a matinee showing if Star Wars that The Admiral took me to when I was two (during which the @#$%ing Tusken Raiders scared the living @#$% out of me). I have a fragment of a memory of staring wide-eyed as the Death Star exploded into a million, billion sparks (back before that odd pressure wave was added to the effect). Others have suggested that, no, I did not see the movie in the theater until some re-release. I confirm that I saw the movie during it's initial release.

By the time i was three, the bedroom I shared with Jason had one wall covered in wallpaper featuring photos of the Star Wars characters, as did bedspreads and books scattered around. Every Christmas and birthday meant the arrival of a landspeeder, or X-Wing or one of those little 12"x18" playsets for the Star Wars gang to hang out.


@#$% YEAH!!!

The kids will be amazed to hear this, but we couldn't go and rent a movie six months after its release, and so you didn't sit down and watch the movie whenever you liked. We had the kid's Star Wars storybook that we'd page through and look at the pictures and figure out the words, and wonder why this scene featuring this guy "Biggs" telling Luke to leave Tatooine was in the book, but nobody remembered seeing it in the movie. So Star Wars was there while I was learning to read.

When we played outside, we had Han's blaster, and a Stormtrooper blaster (they weren't "guns" when you were playing Star Wars. They had to be "blasters".) And one Halloween I was Han Solo, Jason a Jawa, the kid down the street was Luke, and his little sister... an adorable panda bear.

It was unlikely you hadn't seen Star Wars, but if you hadn't, then you were either not born in the US or were, literally, a girl. Usually it meant you were a girl whose mom didn't think girls needed to see movies about space cowboys and samurai in order to be a proper young lady. And whose dad had probably gone to go see the damn movie, himself, anyway.

But Star Wars also gave us ideas about girls, or at least Princess Leia made us believe that girls were supposed to carry blasters, and that their whiplash insults were really just a prelude to smooches we'd get in the engineering bay of the star cruiser we'd eventually win in a hand of cards.

And, poor Carrie Fischer, will always be seen in the mind's eye of a generation of Americans as the girl who launched a thousand hormones when Lucas put her in a metal bikini and made her sit next to Salacious Crumb. (Of course we just as quickly learned that sexiness doesn't equate to helplessness when Leia took Jabba out with the very tools of her imprisonment. So there.)


Most certainly a dame in the media the league once dug

And was there anyone better to teach us that dads can make mistakes, too, than Darth Vader? or Palpatine to teach you that putting a bottomless pit in your living room in an architectural bit of hubris you might not want to consider?

And Yoda taught is it is not the size of the person who matters... not when you really want to move that X-Wing. For years The Admiral would quote to me from Yoda, either fancying himself to be a wizened Jedi Master or knowing that I was far, far more likely to buy the words of Yoda than whatever other advice he might give me. "There is no try..." was oft quoted in the halls of Steans Manor.

It's sad to dwell on the eventual limping fate of the series, but especially with the first two movies... We were kids who still grew up with fantasy lands full of dragons and giants. But we were also kids who had robots and slug gangsters and giant, mechanical quadrupedal death machines to fill our fantasy worlds. Mystic knights of virtue (as well as their brethren who'd gone wrong and needed redemption) populated our consciousness, and, hell... my 4th grade teacher used both Episode IV and Episodes IV-VI to illustrate the Aristotelian three-act structure as well as the various literary themes of Man vs. X.

I have no idea what kids today have latched on to. Power Rangers or Yu-Gi-Oh or something, I guess. But it was a smaller world, and pondering this other universe was something we all had in common.

That's it. I'm not editing this thing.

You guys chat about Star Wars amongst yourselves.